you can find a May Day event here

the website: https://onemillionchessboards.com

the website for it is pretty comprehensive as far as i can tell

this strikes me as a fascinating idea–with a couple of eyebrow-raising backers–that is probably going to flop spectacularly because it’s too minimalistic to the point of just being cheapskate

this is good because the guy was like 80, and he sucks. hopefully he’ll be replaced by someone more progressive and willing to actually recognize the situation we’re in

here’s your fun fact of the day: the hierarchy of how unchecked your law enforcement is basically goes something like federal police > city police departments > rural police departments > sheriffs of any kind. apparently, while regular police are at least nominally accountable to someone higher up than them, we basically let sheriffs do whatever the fuck they want

whatever recourse you think you have against a PD usually and very explicitly will not exist against a sheriff, even if your governor is sympathetic–most states devolve an incredible amount of power to sheriffs while demanding basically no qualifications or oversight of them. also, most outspoken police you will ever hear are probably sheriffs in specific–they are hugely over-represented in politics because there’s nothing stopping them from opining on politics even where ordinary police chiefs and the like are inhibited. (also their positions are usually elected and partisan, so they are politicians)

naturally, the mixture of election and targeting by the far-right over the past 50ish years means like 85% of these guys are just total cranks now too, because almost all of them represent Republican-leaning counties

FYI: we’ve banned this user because after communicating our disinterest in being used as an anti-China dumping ground to shadowbox with people who can’t even see our instance, the user responded with a bunch of hostility about people pushing back on them.

yeah, no shit, that’s not the same as “your entire company being predicated on the unpaid labor of children who you also let do whatever they want without supervision or actually working filtering features”–not least because you could actually get banned for both of the things i mentioned from 2010, while what’s happening now is explicitly enabled by Roblox as their business model and an externality of doing business. as has been demonstrated by recent investigations into how they work down, they basically don’t have a company without systematically exploiting children

it’s been very strange to watch this game i grew up on–pretty innocuously, i should note–gradually morph into one of the most exploitative, undignifying, generally dangerous spaces for children online. the worst stuff i got into on Roblox in 2010 was online dating and learning about 4chan. now the company seems to openly revel in exploiting the labor of children and ripping them off

• Kazumi Watanabe ‎– To Chi Ka
• Sahib Shihab ‎– Sentiments
• Dr. Lonnie Smith - Boogaloo to Beck: A Tribute
• Takeo Moriyama - Smile
• Sevil - Sevil
• Collage - Kadriko

stuff that is basically jazz, even though it isn’t actually:

• Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe - Ikengas in London

he assuredly won’t win as an independent given his appalling numbers in the primary so, lol, good riddance

What you mean? Have you seen all those articles publisher website just giving out 8-9 on every damn game they get early access to?

this has been an issue people have complained about in gaming journalism for–and i cannot stress this sufficiently–longer than i’ve been alive, and i’ve been alive for 25 years. so if we’re going by this metric video gaming has been “ruined” since at least the days of GTA2, Pokemon Gold & Silver, and Silent Hill. obviously, i don’t find that a very compelling argument.

if anything, the median game has gotten better and that explains the majority of review score inflation–most “bad” gaming experiences at this point are just “i didn’t enjoy my time with this game” rather than “this game is outright technically incompetent, broken, or incapable of being played to completion”.

no, obviously not; is this a serious question? because i have no idea how you could possibly sustain it

currently reading:

Then we slap a random-ass speed limit sign down and say “job’s done.”

we don’t actually–the basis we derive most speed limits from is actually much worse, if you can believe that. from Killed by a Traffic Engineer:

Traffic engineers use what we call the 85th percentile speed. The 85th percentile speed is whatever speed 85 percent of drivers are traveling slower than. If we have 100 drivers on the road and rank them in order from fastest to slowest, the 15th fastest driver would give us our 85th percentile speed.

Traffic engineers will then look 5 mph faster and 5 mph slower to see what percentage of drivers fall into different 10 mph ranges. According to David Solomon and his curves, the magnitude of the speed range doesn’t matter as long as we get as many drivers as possible into that 10 mph range.

and, as applied to the example of the Legacy Parkway, to show how this invariably spirals out of control:

North of Salt Lake City, the Legacy Parkway parallels Interstate 15 up to the Wasatch Weave interchange where these highways come together. It’s a four-lane, controlled-access highway with a wide, grassy median and more than its fair share of safety problems.

So how did the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) respond?

It increased the speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph. It said the speed limit jump will “eliminate the safety risk” on the Legacy Parkway.

UDOT conducted speed studies up and down the Legacy Parkway. It found that most drivers were going much faster than the 55 mph speed limit. Channeling the ghost of traffic engineers past, the safety director for UDOT said, “We decided to raise the speed limit to a speed that is closer to what drivers are actually driving. In doing so, we hope to eliminate the safety risk of speed discrepancy, which can happen when you have a significant difference between the speed most drivers are actually traveling and those who are driving the posted speed limit.”

In the case of the Legacy Parkway, the 85th percentile speeds ranged from 65 mph to 75 mph. Based on that and what it deems engineering judgment, UDOT originally proposed raising the speed limit to 70 mph. After community pushback, it settled for 65 mph.

According to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), this slight adjustment is acceptable. The MUTCD specifies that speed limits “should be within 5 mph of the 85th percentile speed of free-flowing traffic.”

i’m removing this because it’s a completely empty calorie comment with literally no relation to an extremely detailed, well done article. please don’t make comments like this, thanks.

Aside from the obvious stuff like promoting mutual aid, grassroots agitation efforts are probably your best bet. Organize in workplaces and other places where people meet, get them angry and suggest effective courses of action.

respectfully: this is just not a serious proposal. and the fact that you think nobody is doing these things—rather than what is actually the case, which is that people do them but they are simply not effective or easy-to-scale acts of political praxis in an American context—is indicative that you should stop making confidently bad tactical prescriptions.

and i’m not even going to address your fantastical idea of how to build a spontaneous general strike out of “mass protests” when it is evident you have bad tactical prescriptions. you’re not even treading new ground here, really. Peter Camejo’s speech “Liberalism, ultraleftism, or mass action” is the definitive dunk on your flavor of politically delusional theorycrafting, and that speech turns 55 this year:

This is the key thing to understand about the ultraleftists. The actions they propose are not aimed at the American people; they’re aimed at those who have already radicalized. They know beforehand that masses of people won’t respond to the tactics they propose.

They have not only given up on the masses but really have contempt for them. Because on top of all this do you know what else the ultralefts propose? They call for a general strike! They get up and say, “General Strike.” Only they don’t have the slightest hope whatsoever that it will come off.

Every last one of them who raises his hand to vote for a general strike knows it’s not going to happen. So what the hell do they raise their hands for? Because it’s part of the game. They play games, they play revolution, because they have no hope. Just during the month of May the New Mobe called not one but two general strikes. One for GIs and one for workers.

Being out for the count before anything actually happens doesn’t seem to be good strategy

you’re right, people have never martyred themselves (and, in a sense “been out for the count before anything happens”) for successful political change before. do you realize how ridiculous this sounds? you are the classic person who–even if they are legitimately radical, which i don’t think you are–upholds the status quo by, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr, “lives by a mythical concept of time” and always wants to wait for a more convenient season to do something. but plainly, the more convenient season will never come if nobody does anything because they might be “out for the count”.

So… I’m not really pro-capitalism as you’d likely conceive of that term,

i don’t know what you think “not really [being] pro-capitalism” means, but the fact that you can neither straightforwardly state that you believe in socialism nor elaborate substantively on your economic beliefs is an indicator you’re just some sort of radical liberal. and that’s fine–and radical liberalism is nice and all for this moment–but it is not a serious ideological system with credible tactics that will eradicate fascism or solve the inequalities and inequities that create the basis of right-wing authoritarianism.

I don’t think you get me. You likely don’t have until 2026. A lot of the infrastructure for a full authoritarian takeover is already in place.

okay, let’s suppose this is true: what would you like me as an individual to do besides what i am already doing. help organize a general strike? one is already being organized for 2028, and you can’t exactly spin up the infrastructure for one of those in a matter of months unless you operate under a very incorrect idea of how unions work. a strike is a massive financial, political, and organizational commitment–to say nothing of how a strike necessitates buy-in from the workers who engage in it (perhaps 40% of whom are in favor of the current administration, and would thus need to be convinced to organize against it).

or maybe you propose some sort of political violence? maybe firebombing a government office or assassinating an elected official? aside from op-sec considerations, those would be very stupid ideas to take up. bluntly: we’ve been there and done this. most left-wing political violence in the West does nothing to substantially harm the state, and frequently, it actually legitimizes authoritarian violence in the eyes of the public. the primary base of support for ideas like this are ultraliberals and ultraleftists who confuse the spectacle of political violence for meaningful political action–people who, in other words, think the most transgressive action they can take is the most correct one.

and if not these, what else? organize boycotts? people already do those. organize public marches? people already do those, to the point where it’s impossible to keep up with all of the ones being organized. organize sit-ins and other nonviolent protest? people already do those. i don’t know what you expect here that isn’t already happening.

If not wanting to get arrested and tortured (again, this is not a hypothetical) is slothfulness then… Uh… Okay?

if you aren’t willing to face meaningful political consequences for what you believe in, then what tactical or ideological advice could you possibly have that i should care about? the law has already pacified your politics and your convictions into uselessness–you have essentially stated you won’t fight for what’s right because it would inconvenience you.

this is also contradictory to what you’re arguing in the first place: how is this position of yours any different from Sanders’ supposed failure to meet the moment with tactics and radical politics? if fighting for what’s right means potentially being arrested and tortured then, yes, as unpleasant as such a commitment sounds you should be willing to be arrested and tortured!

First, I never said I was a socialist.

well then i definitely don’t care what you have to say in terms of criticism—if you’re not a socialist then the ideological framework from which you make that criticism is incorrect on merits and an incorrect basis on which to build a political movement which will ever resolve the crises you identify here. these crises are symptomatic of capitalism and a product of it;^[1] you cannot separate the economic system out here, nor will superficial political and economic reforms ever prevent what is happening now in America and Europe from occurring again in the future.

you need only look at the Nordic and Finnish democracies—where genuinely social-democratic reforms still define many aspects of society and are load-bearing aspects of the contemporary political culture—to illustrate this. they still have massive problems with reactionaries, would-be authoritarians, and open fascists gaining political credibility; but this is unsurprising if you recognize that, at the end of the day, they still live in a hegemonic economic system which cannot exist without necessarily impoverishing some people to make others wealthy, and creating debilitating social and political inequities. you will never deprive reactionary politics of their oxygen and grievances until this is resolved, and socialism is the only economic system which can bring this about.

Sorry I can’t pass your little purity test; now actually do something something so you don’t end up like us.

luckily, i am. most of my waking hours are spent doing behind-the-scenes political work, and i can also literally point you to some of the public-facing work i’m doing well in advance of our next elections. see, just as a sample, my Support 2026 and Oppose 2026 lists, or my For a “Bill of Rights” Package in Every State, County, and City which lays out an electoral strategy for American socialists to adopt and whose basic planks i’m pushing for within DSA in the lead-up to this year’s convention. don’t put your slothfulness and excuses for why you can’t do political work on me, a person actually doing political work as a volunteer day job because i want the things i believe in to be built in my lifetime.

Responding to that post wasn’t worth my time

okay, so you don’t have an answer or a strategy, and when challenged on that you resort to denigrating people as “liberals” for disagreeing with you. thank you for clarifying that your opinions are worthless.